Evaluating Your Tech Needs
In our increasingly digitised world, consumption habits are changing – both at a consumer and enterprise level – which in turn will significantly impact the way the C-Suite assesses their company’s technology needs. Consumers and employees are demanding access to information from any device, anywhere, at any time. This places additional pressure on existing technology infrastructure to essentially deliver more with shrinking IT budgets, without compromising security or performance. What’s more, as businesses continue to recover in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, many are still dealing with cutbacks in IT investment and a shift in purchasing decision makers from the IT manager to business division heads, and the C-suite. With the increasing ability to implement critical technology services via software, businesses will demand the flexibility to grow based on their requirements, simply by adding additional software resources on their servers. This shift from Capital Expenditure (CapEx) to Operational Expenditure (OpEx) will mean that IT is viewed more as a utility in the coming years, opening up huge cost saving opportunities for businesses. Ultimately, services available on-demand through flexible licensing models will become a well-trodden path – given the reported benefits are to address increasing demand on delivering services. By having access to flexible billing options, executives will be able to scale the services up (or down) as needed, without a major upfront investment. Another trend that set to cause a series of technology shifts for businesses is the proliferation of new device adoption such as mobile phones, tablets, and ultra-mobile PCs, along with social technologies and The Internet of Things. In fact, with the cost of smartphones predicted by Gartner to come down to below the US$50 mark, it will open up mobile technology to more people than ever before. Inevitably, businesses need to consider more intelligent ways to serve customers online and on-the-go. As consumer mobile devices become ‘corporatised’, end-users will expect secure access to services from any device, and with web applications under increasing attack, security will also need to be top of mind. Ultimately, whether it’s for security, mobility, performance or ensuring availability, IT infrastructure will need to align with new innovations and changing user demands. The velocity of non-traditional enterprise applications being used in business will open up risks and require organisations to consider the security implications. Gen Y and Z employees will continue to demand a socialised environment; blurring the lines between personal-social and business-social applications. From malware to data leakage, organisations will find themselves at risk if they don’t adequately manage the social element of their organisations. C-level executives will need to start thinking about introducing policies and ensuring their IT infrastructure is prepared to cater to this new breed of employees, in order to stay competitive. Regardless of how they access corporate information through applications, these users have come to expect equivalent or better performance on a mobile or tablet than that achieved on a typical desktop computer. What businesses need is a backend infrastructure that can help deliver image-heavy content, prioritise traffic to overcome mobile network latency, and offer visibility into application performance. Furthermore, as cyber crime becomes more complex, with attacks from multiple angles on different devices, single-purpose security machines will be phased out in favour of sophisticated multi-purpose machines. This convergence will also happen in the context of performance, as businesses come to expect fast, reliable user experience on any device.The Revolution Towards a Software Defined Everything.
The IT fraternity has swarmed around the concept of software-defined networking everything, which encompasses the accompanying buzzwords of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Storage (SDS) and even extending to Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). IDC estimates that this emerging software-defined networking market will be worth approximately $3.7 billion by 2016, up from $360 million in 2013. Broadly, the revolution towards a software-defined infrastructure revolves around splitting the hard-wired material that executes data transactions from the software layer that commands them. It is a little bit like a mind/body split, with the theory that by keeping the mind in top shape, the underlying body will require less upkeep and may be cheaper to service. The IT arena is certainly moving towards a software-defined future. According to IDC, that last twelve months has been the growth spurt for SDN, with most telecom equipment vendors announcing and starting to deliver first generation SDN product enhancements. However, in these early stages, IDC also found the various vendor approaches to SDN fragmented, with different vendors still leveraging proprietary architectures for their products. In the year ahead, IDC is predicting that multi-vendor offerings will start to emerge. But we are still in the early stages of the path to SDE. There are two key things driving the journey from SDN to SDE. The first is the business driver. End-user expectations and business demands have largely driven the way data centres are now set up and managed. This paradigm shift is being aided by the second driver: technological developments and government policies in vertical industries such as financial services or the public sector, particularly driven by the need to generate greater efficiencies, adhere to strict industry regulations and protect against sophisticated security attacks, at a lower cost to the business. SDDC is a critical part of the growing wave of software-defined technology. Its emergence has stemmed from a need for greater operational efficiency and management simplicity, and sees software increasingly performing functions traditionally provided by hardware. It has coincided with the emergence of the Software Defined Fabric (SDF) that goes beyond the traditional abstraction of the networking layers, and sees auxiliary services, such as security and the application layer, embedded across the fabric. F5 has taken the same principles applied to SDN (which primarily addresses Layers 2-3 in the network), and deployed them to the application layers (Layers 4-7), providing Software Defined Application Services (SDAS). These are services deployed in the network between the end-user and the application. SDAS provide application owners with the ability to address application mobility, security, access and identity, performance and availability challenges architecturally. Now that the software-defined movement has emerged in response to demands by organisations for a more flexible, scalable, cost-effective, agile environment to address end-user, regulatory and business requirements, SDN is something every channel player needs to be aware of, and understand. Meanwhile, the all-encompassing, SDE is in its infancy. It will certainly be a trend that continues to take shape and therefore an important one for the channel. Ultimately, SDN enables networks to be more flexible, scalable, cost-effective and agile. It improves deployment times for new applications and services. As businesses move to a more cloud-based and virtual environment service providers will need networks that have all these features. Which is why cloud providers and telcos, are top of the queue for SDN deployments and are driving the path to an SDE future.Taking the driver’s seat in the App-centric journey
The app economy has taken hold of the world at lightning pace. It is as much social and cultural as it is economic. At its core is how it affects and engages the wider technology landscape. Connectivity is no longer a mere mechanism of interconnected ‘dumb pipes’. Thanks to the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), connectivity is evolving into an ecosystem of increasingly intelligent, bi–directional streams of knowledge. This shift to sensor-driven, wireless connectivity for devices, appliances, inert objects from the high-end (e.g. tracking electricity flows for cities) to the mundane (e.g. replacing the milk in your fridge) has taken the ubiquity of the Internet to a new level and is compelling companies of all sizes to transform and adapt. Gartner predicts that by 2020, Internet of Things will create $1.9 trillion of economic value add, globally. In 2009, there were 2.5 billion connected devices, globally; most of these were mobile phones, PCs and tablets. In 2020, Gartner predicts there will be over 30 billion devices connected, of far greater variety. While the demand is pushing new boundaries in connectivity and its applications, the technology ecosystem for enabling the IoT is highly fragmented. In order to make this new layer of interconnectedness work, solutions must be curated from various providers of sensors and communications modules, network management and control systems, communications networks, enterprise applications and customer-facing applications. The network borders as we knew them are collapsing and in their place are seemingly disparate clusters of cloud and mobility, and the ever present generation of new sources of data and higher stream of traffic. For companies navigating this new terrain, management and planning of infrastructure is essential and understanding how to get ‘social intelligence’ in the connectivity fabric is paramount. Intelligent data centres are now in vogue, splitting the control plane with data plane so that data and services can be shared and moved within an expandable network fabric. In order for ‘social intelligence’ to work, data and services need to be orchestrated efficiently and simply from a single point of management. Out of this shift, Software Defined Application Services (SDAS), the next inevitable phase in the evolution of application delivery has emerged. SDAS is the result of delivering highly flexible and programmatic application services from a unified, high-performance application service fabric and serves to solve the significant challenges that the IoT is creating. SDAS relies on abstraction, the ability to take advantage of resources pooled from any combination of physical, virtual and cloud-deployed platforms. SDAS provides answers to new questions enterprises are facing from controlling application delivery via traffic management over broadening applications services to include web application security, mobility, LTE, domain name services in addition to facilitating cloud-ready services. The Synthesis solution is already changing the way we interact with our customers and partners by giving them flexibility and the ability to be as inclusive as they like across their application choices. The elastic, multi-tenant service fabric that delivers SDAS can cluster up to 32 F5 devices deployed across any combination of hardware, software or cloud and supports up to 80 unique instances per device. That translates to a combined throughput of 20 TB and connection capacity of 9.2 billion, more than three times the capacity needed to connect every Internet user in the world. The changing application and network architecture landscape requires such an evolution in software defined app services. The new application centred world needs solutions that empower IT and business stakeholders to align technology with their biggest challenges. The application services that have become critical to ensuring the reliability, security and performance of the plethora of applications that enterprises engage with must be provisioned, managed and scaled in a way that aligns with an application-driven world. As the industry collectively builds the faster, broader super connected, super highway for Software Defined Network players, we are ensuring that all cars get from point A to B smoothly, smartly and with tools to facilitate their their journey.F5 opens Support Centre in Auckland
Did you hear about the opening of our latest Support Centre in Auckland?! This is our latest global expansion to provide our customers with the most convenient access to our technical support operations. The decision to launch the support centre in Auckland was driven by strong demand we have been experiencing for F5’s Application Delivery Networking solutions and services, as well as our growing partner ecosystem in Asia Pacific. Can’t say how much we are honoured with Local Dignitaries and ICT representatives in New Zealand gracing our Opening! The Hon. Nikki Kaye and the Mayor of Auckland Len Brown delivered short addresses to the attendees about the significance of the new support centre for the local market, highlighting Auckland as a strategic business and innovation hub for the APAC region, as well as the opportunities F5’s investment is creating for the local economy. Kaye also tweeted about the opening live from the event. Among our very own F5 executives involved in the proceedings included Julian Eames, Executive Vice President of Business Operations, Mark Kramer, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Support, and Tony Bill, Managing Director for Australia & New Zealand. The establishment of this new Support Centre is critical to our partners and key in being closer to our customers in terms of geography and time zones. For example, being able to offer the convenience of multi-language and regional support, means we can be more responsive to ensuring the satisfaction and success of our customers. At the same time, the move has also added to F5’s robust ‘Follow the Sun’ customer support concept, which essentially serves to ensure better coverage, and more efficient and localised support for our fast growing customer base across the Asia Pacific region. This is F5’s 5th and newest Support Centre in Asia Pacific and Japan, after Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo, in addition to five other support centres across the globe. When the formalities of the official ribbon cutting ceremony came to a close, our guests were invited to celebratory refreshments and canapés.IT security isn’t one size fits all
The security landscape today is highly complex, which can largely be attributed to the increasingly sophisticated nature of cyber attacks, particularly from an execution perspective. For example, DDoS attacks are now reaching speeds of up to 400Gbps, targeting both the network and application layer. Evidently, attackers are progressing towards other methods to bypass traditionalsecurity defenses, including the firewall. In this particular scenario, the challenge for organisations with application-layer DDoS attacks is to differentiate human traffic from bot traffic. In addition, the motivation behind attacks is becoming more complex especially from a political and economic standpoint. The NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, which revealed classified information from governments including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand is a recent example of a high profile hacking incident that certainly reminds us of this fact. Moreover, one of the biggest threats to IT security is now organsied cyber theft and fraud, as the smartest criminals in the world are increasingly realising the substantial financial gains that can be made via online crime. Hence, the need for an enterprise to ensure it is adequately protected against cyber attacks is becoming increasingly critical. An effective security strategy will cover all devices, applications and networks accessed by employees, beyond the enterprise infrastructure itself. Traditional security methods such as next generation firewalls and reactive security measures are losing the fight of being effective against the new breed of attacks. Security is now very much about the protection of the application, enforcement of encryption and the protection of the users identity, and less about the supporting network infrastructure. This is because it has become far less static in recent times and has truly proven to be nothing more of a commodity transport vehicle for the complex applications that run on top of it. What organisations need is a security strategy that is flexible and comprehensive, with the ability to combine DNS security and DDoS protection, network firewall, access management, and application security with intelligent traffic management. Developments in the market which has seen theintegration of WebApplication Firewalls (WAFs) with Application Delivery Controller (ADC) platforms, as recognised by a recent study by Frost & Sullivan (the Frost Industry Quotient), has driven F5 to create a new vision / architecture called F5 Synthesis for the application delivery market. This vision offers a high performance network fabric to protect fundamental elements of an application (network, DNS, SSL, HTTP) against sophisticated DDoS attacks. F5 Synthesis, through the use of tested reference architectures, ensures that applications are kept secure and available as customers make the journey toward software defined data centres (SDDS). Moreover, F5’s DDoS protection solution delivers the most comprehensive attack protection available on the market to date. While the average DDoS attacks reach 2.64 Gbps, upgrades to F5’s BIG-IP platform allow servers to handle attacks as large as 470 Gbps. Not only is there enough bandwidth to mitigate a DDoS attack, the extra capacity allows online companies to continue normal business - even while under attack. Security won’t be one size fits all during 2014. End users will expect high performance, however organisations must ensure they deploy security solutions that don’t become a bottleneck. This year, we can expect to see a rise in a multi-dimensional or 'cocktail' style attacks: DDoS attacks combined with application layer attacks and SQL vulnerabilities. As such, the traditional firewall is no longer a viable security defense, and organisations need to have a multi-stack security approach, combined with a process to handle internal control. With attacks from multiple angles on different devices, single-purpose security machines will be phased out in favour of sophisticated multi-purpose machines.
